Any opinions on a good DVD authoring software to transfer TiVo recordings?

Hey All

Using kmttg, I am able to have glorious HD versions of anything from my TiVo that is of course, not copy protected. However, the current software I have on my computer- Corel DVD Movie Factory is giving me issues. Whenever I import the video (note- I do not convert it- I use the actual .mpg file), and then play it in my home DVD player, the picture moves in almost a robotic way. It is difficult to explain but it kind of looks like stop and go instead of the picture moving normally. Playing the files on the computer works perfect so I am thinking it is the software doing this.

Is there a better software I should be using to get better quality or am I doing something wrong when it comes to importing and clicking on burn. I am not changing anything on the software when I do it so I can't imagine I have any setting wrong.

Are you making Blu-ray DVD's? (Not all versions of Movie Factory will create them). If not then your HD mpg's need to be resized to SD (720x480) resolution before they can go on a DVD. In either case Movie Factory should do whatever is needed to make the output it is spec'ed to do, but in either case there will be significant recoding time - ten's of minutes per hour of video even on a fast PC.

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Are you making Blu-ray DVD's? (Not all versions of Movie Factory will create them). If not then your HD mpg's need to be resized to SD (720x480) resolution before they can go on a DVD. In either case Movie Factory should do whatever is needed to make the output it is spec'ed to do, but in either case there will be significant recoding time - ten's of minutes per hour of video even on a fast PC.

Ah. So I should resize down to 720x480 but what about the bitrate and frame rate? I shouldn't keep those as they are, right? Any idea what I should resize those too?

No. If you resize an HD source down to 720 x 480. then all else being equal the bit rate will plummet. Roughly speaking, a 720 x 480 interlaced MPEG-II target should have about 1/6 the size and bit rate of a 1080i source at the same frame rate. That is why an SD movie can usually easily fit on a DVD, while most HD movies cannot.

Quote:

Originally Posted by truegalbklyn

and frame rate? I shouldn't keep those as they are, right? Any idea what I should resize those too?

I wouldn't ordinarily muck with the frame rate unless your source is 1080p x 24 or 1080p x 60. If it is coming from a TiVo, it won't be.

No. If you resize an HD source down to 720 x 480. then all else being equal the bit rate will plummet. Roughly speaking, a 720 x 480 interlaced MPEG-II target should have about 1/6 the size and bit rate of a 1080i source at the same frame rate. That is why an SD movie can usually easily fit on a DVD, while most HD movies cannot.

I wouldn't ordinarily muck with the frame rate unless your source is 1080p x 24 or 1080p x 60. If it is coming from a TiVo, it won't be.

Wow, thanks.

This is what gets me. Back when I used to download torrents of tv shows I missed (before I had my TiVo), I noticed people uploaded files that were smaller but still retained similar quality to the HD video they used before conversion.

To cure my curiosity, I checked the resolution, bit rate, and frame rate of a specific torrent and the bit rate was down to something along the lines of 1001 and frame rate down to 23. Those seem like HUGE drops from the original file yet the videos themselves still looked quite decent.

I guess they are using a professional style converter in order to do that and keep the videos looking so good.

Just to be clear, if you use VRD TVS3 to make the DVD, VRD will do the resizing that is needed -- you don't need to do it beforehand. As I said before it will take some CPU time to do this.

Instead of throwing away the HD resolution, have you considered making Blu-ray DVD's? Of course you have to have a BR burner drive to do this and suitable software, which doesn't include VRD. The only free software I know of (AVCHD) has a significant learning curve but I think you could purchase something for under $100 that would be easy to use. Part of the process includes recoding your MPG to H.264 (.mp4 or .m2ts) which also takes a lot of CPU cycles. But resolution and quality will be maintained at HD levels.

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Just to be clear, if you use VRD TVS3 to make the DVD, VRD will do the resizing that is needed -- you don't need to do it beforehand. As I said before it will take some CPU time to do this.

Instead of throwing away the HD resolution, have you considered making Blu-ray DVD's? Of course you have to have a BR burner drive to do this and suitable software, which doesn't include VRD. The only free software I know of (AVCHD) has a significant learning curve but I think you could purchase something for under $100 that would be easy to use. Part of the process includes recoding your MPG to H.264 (.mp4 or .m2ts) which also takes a lot of CPU cycles. But resolution and quality will be maintained at HD levels.

This is what gets me. Back when I used to download torrents of tv shows I missed (before I had my TiVo), I noticed people uploaded files that were smaller but still retained similar quality to the HD video they used before conversion.

To cure my curiosity, I checked the resolution, bit rate, and frame rate of a specific torrent and the bit rate was down to something along the lines of 1001 and frame rate down to 23. Those seem like HUGE drops from the original file yet the videos themselves still looked quite decent.

I guess they are using a professional style converter in order to do that and keep the videos looking so good.

Quote:

Originally Posted by steve614

Or they are using VideoReDo TV Suite v.4 with h.264 encoding.

Those files must have been H.264 encoded. No mpeg2-encoded video is going to look "quite decent" at 1 Mbps unless your viewing it at 320x240 resolution. For HD resolution, you have to work really hard (read: long encoding time) to get "quite decent" PQ at 1 Mbps even with H.264 encoding -- actually I'm not sure it's even possible. (H.264 is inherently more compressive, and can produce the same PQ with 2X to 4X reduction in file size [or bitrate])

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AFAIK it won't, since it won't generate BR images, which is why I said VRD wasn't suitable software for making BR discs. I think they want to add that feature -- some time.

Of course VRD TVS4 will generate HD H.264 videos that are suitable for authoring to a BR disc, but that's only part of the process.

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It fixes the problem where the program does not show the length (timestamp) properly on the PC or Tivo.

What's more, as long as "Ignore transport stream maps" is disabled (it's enabled by default), it also virtually eliminates the issues which cause the video to fail when transferred back to the TiVo, as otherwise happens from time to time.

something along the lines of 1001 and frame rate down to 23. Those seem like HUGE drops from the original file yet the videos themselves still looked quite decent.

Both film and video rely upon an effect known as "persistence of vision". An image splashed across the retina will be retained in visual memory for about 1/20th of a second. If an image, moving or otherwise, is splashed across the retina more than about 20 times per second, the result is perceived as continuous by the mind. At rates lower than about 20 times per second, most people will perceive the image to flicker, and if the image is not static, the motion will not be perceived to be smooth. At 24 frames per second, almost no one perceives any flicker or jitter in the image.

That is for film. Video suffers an additional problem. For several reasons too technical to discuss here, video does not splash an entire image across the retina, however. Instead, it writes multiple lines across the screen, which are once again perceived as a smooth image by the brain despite its intermittent nature. Again, for reasons too technical to relate here, it also traditionally does not write an entire screen at once. Rather it breaks up the screen (or page) into two fields, one consisting of all the odd lines and one consisting of all the even lines. The fields are written at a rate of 60 fields per second, or 30 pages per second. This is known as interlaced video. Both because of the way the video is displayed and also because of the behavior of the phosphors in a classic CRT display, a video displayed in the traditional manner at 24 pages per second would have PQ problems. Thus the higher frame rate for video. Modern progressive displays, however, can manage to produce very decent PQ when displaying at 24fps, meaning in some cases no telecine conversion from 24 fps to 30/60fps is required.

Note for the sake of brevity, I have somewhat over-simplified much of the above information.